WIP 7 (7.0.20084.11445, 24/03/2020)
1] Why is the viewports settings for the rendered view (in options) allowed priority over the backdrop in the render panel?
This is very confusing – if you are going to set up your render, then surely it is logical to have all the controls that affect this in one place?
2] Changing the sun intensity (as changed via the “Sun Settings” in the lighting tag) doesn’t reveal any corresponding change in the intensity of the shadow cast.
3] The sun and what I suppose to be the default rhino light (ie the light that lights the scene when there are no user lights, and neither the sun or skylight are on) seem to be reversed in their directional operation.
So, when the rhino light is on, it creates a shadow on the groundplane and this shadow shows that the light is stationary and doesn’t move with the objects when the scene is rotated.
Conversely, when the sun is the only light source, both it and the objects are locked in a universe where they move together when the scene is rotated.
In the real world, when we rotate objects, the sun doesn’t rotate with them – ie the sun behaves as the rhino default light does.
Since the rhino light is just a construct within the model (ie can be thought of as a stage light within the scene) it makes sense to me that it might rotate with the scene. It also makes sense that it might stay stationary, like a stage light, while the objects in the scene (on the stage) rotate.
So this might be argued either way, but surely the sun shouldn’t rotate?
4] Why is there no option to remove unused materials? (Yes, I know the purge command is hidden in the tools/file utilities/purge unused information), but that’s not exactly where you might think to look when working with setting up the model to render, especially when the materials menu offers “show all materials, show only used materials and show only unused materials” .
5] The icon things that look like gearshift knobs from a 1950’s British sports car and supposedly show what the render materials are like are, in their “tiny” thumbnail setting useless, and in their “large” setting both take up far too much space, and are still not accurate except in the most basic way.
Could all this be better? – surely it could, and an example of an existing better solution might be KeyShot; I know nothing about this program beyond watching this video of Phil Cook from simplyrhino UK setting up a scene to render, and I thought, well this is a pretty good example of something not a million miles away from the rhino setup, which is pretty straightforward and logical, and that produces a great result, or certainly as much result as I would want…
cheers
rabbit
